BAD WRITING OF DOCTORS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 18955, 4 March 1936, Page 13

BAD WRITING OF DOCTORS

SIGNATURES UNREADABLE NEW LAW SUGGESTED LONDON, Jan. 0. The suggestion that doctors should be required by law to write their prescriptions on notepnper with the ad dress printed at the top and should sign them legibly was made by a chemist at an incpicst at St. Pancras yesterday. A verdict of death by misadventure was recorded on Paul Alexander Hose 65, printer, of Dennington Park road, Hampstead, who died from a slight overdose of dial tablets.

It was stated that Pose always 'thought that he was about to contract serious illnesses. Many specialists had been called, but had found nothing wrong with him. The coroner said a prescription foi dial had been used more than once. Mr. Sidney J. Pope, a chemist, of Haverstoek Hill, said that there wan no prohibition in the case ot dial. Shown a prescription and asked if he knew where it came from, Mr. Pope replied, "No, the address and signature are indecipherable." The coroner: If it is sufficiently legible do you accept it as a prescription ?-Mf the prescription is written in the usual terms in Latin.

Mr. Pope suggested that a regulation should be made requiring doctors to issue prescriptions on their notepaper, bearing their names and addresses in print at the top, and that thev should be required to sign them legibly. Half the doctors' signatures orT prescriptions were indecipherable.